Principal Scientist, Biologics Optimization

Principal Scientist, Biologics Optimization

At Johnson & Johnson, we believe health is everything. Our strength in healthcare innovation empowers us to build a world where complex diseases are prevented, treated, and cured, where treatments are smarter and less invasive, and solutions are personal. Through our expertise in Innovative Medicine and Med Tech, we are uniquely positioned to innovate across the full spectrum of healthcare solutions today to deliver the breakthroughs of tomorrow, and profoundly impact health for humanity.

We are searching for the best talent for Principal Scientist, Biologics Optimization in Spring House, PA.

Purpose:

The Biologics Optimization team within Biologics Discovery is responsible for accelerating biologic drug discovery by integrating experimental data, engineering insights, and emerging technologies to enable differentiated therapeutic outcomes. In this position, the Principal Scientist, Optimization Platform Integration, will serve as a scientific leader responsible for transforming discovery data into actionable knowledge and scalable capabilities that advance molecule optimization and platform development.

Leveraging expertise at the intersection of biologics discovery, antibody engineering, data-driven research, and laboratory automation, this individual will uncover relationships between sequence, structure, function, and biological outcomes to establish design principles that guide optimization strategies. Through deep interrogation and integration of diverse data sources and development of automation-enabled workflows, the successful candidate will create frameworks that not only generate scientific insight but also systematically apply those learnings across optimization platforms.

Working closely with Therapeutic Area scientists, protein engineers, computational scientists, and automation teams, this leader will drive the evolution of next-generation yeast display, NGS, and high-throughput optimization capabilities, ensuring that data generation, analysis, and experimental execution are tightly connected. The Principal Scientist will champion a data-driven culture within Biologics Optimization by developing approaches to organize, leverage, and operationalize experimental data at scale, while providing technical leadership for automation integration efforts that enhance reproducibility, throughput, and decision quality.

By combining scientific insight, automation innovation, and platform development, this individual will help establish a continuous learning environment in which data generated from discovery efforts directly informs future engineering strategies, accelerates timelines, and improves portfolio-wide optimization outcomes. While based in Spring House, PA, the role will include periodic travel to the Cambridge, MA site to ensure alignment on technology development, infrastructure priorities, and implementation of automation capabilities.

You will be responsible for:

• Provide scientific leadership for automation-enabled discovery workflows, helping define future capabilities that increase throughput, reproducibility, and data generation across biologics optimization platforms.
• Partner closely with automation teams across sites to support implementation, continuous improvement, and long-term evolution in automation of yeast display, NGS and related discovery technologies.
• Partner with Therapeutic Area, Discovery, and Technology teams to identify key scientific questions and leverage data-driven analyses to guide decision-making across the biologics portfolio.
• Collaborate with computational scientists, AI/ML experts, and experimental teams to apply advanced analytical approaches that enhance understanding of biological drivers and improve discovery efficiency.
• Serve as a subject matter expert in scientific intelligence and knowledge generation, developing approaches to transform experimental data into actionable understanding of sequence-function, structure-function, and mechanism-function relationships.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, analytical methods, and automation solutions to identify opportunities for accelerating biologics discovery and…